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1) Ramdisk? Wth? Ramdisks are dumb in the age of a modern OS. Sacrifice a bunch of RAM that can then not be used in the regular virtual paging scheme is the epitome of "I just do not have a clue". Unlock the potential to cripple my system? Sign me not up.2) Why do my expensive Radeon HD 7970's from Diamond and XFX not support Windows 8 secure boot? That seems like it would be a better thing to spend money on than developing RAM that was too slow already a year ago when I got 32GB of 2400 MHz kit for my new Asus board + Ivy Bridge system at the exact same cost / Gb as this inadequate stuff. Slower RAM does not help me. Fast and secure boot would.Reply

To be fair about the cost/GB, RAM prices have at least doubled in the last few months. I bought several kits of 1600 for $25 and 1866 for $30 around the holidays. Those exact same kits are $66 and $69 dollars right now respectively.Reply

Very true. I should have specified consumer stuff. From what I read a while back, the big 4 had all drastically cut commodity DRAM output to focus that capacity on enterprise and mobile. So your experience seems to validate that. Reply

Negative. In the days of 32-bit console ports and MMOs with increasingly large data sets trying to maintain compatibility with the ancient XP, a RAM disk is very USFL at manually caching the game assets since the developers are unwilling to maintain two separate codebases. This is particularly a problem with SWTOR where zoning times to some planets is measured in minutes on a fast system with two SSDs in RAID0.

The fact is, most games aren't programmed flawlessly or particularly well. Again, to use SWTOR as an example, it copied all zone data not into memory when loading, but instead into a temporary multi-gigabyte 'arenacache' file on disk. This was particularly unhealthy for SSDs, which are vulnerable to longevity problems when a game writes more than 20gb of data to disk every play session, as it did when I was still playing. For that game, and I'd imagine others, 32gb of cheap memory and learning how to use imdisk made my play experience better and saved my expensive SSDs some unnecessary wear.

This "arenacache" thing is exactly what happens in large programming environments. The engine team says "This data file format is really slow and inefficient. We want to fix it." And the asset team says, "We can't change it. All our tools write in this format. Get stuffed." And so the engine team, needing to load things quickly from hard drives because gamers don't have 20GB of RAM, have to copy and reformat all the game assets into their own, actually useful format.

You may be able to tell I have a lot of sympathy for the software engineers who actually want things to be fast and efficient.Reply

I have sympathy for them as well. The problem is this cowardly attempt to maintain backwards compatibility with a 9-year old (WinXP SP2 = Win2003) 32-bit OS instead of making a stand and using the popularity of SWTOR (which many of my friends built new systems for in anticipation) to drive adoption of 64-bit systems where memory management is less of a headache.

There is still great use for RAMDisk, such as a cache folder for your browser (especially Chrome). Not necessarily for speed gains, but to alleviate high I/O from SSD/HD to RAM and prolong its life.Reply

The point of these memory modules is primarily accelerating APU gaming performance, the one thing that is significantly affected by memory speed.

I imagine the benchmark results are from comparing with the 1600MHz kit as the difference between 1866MHz and 2133MHz is far less than 22%. It's quite a big difference in performance but without knowing the benchmark particulars (or, indeed, slide 14 of the presentation), it's not amazingly indicative of anything.Reply

Huh? That is entirely up to the CPU memory controller. I don't think AMD has quad channel CPUs in the consumer field (no idea about Opteron). So if you go with a consumer AMD or Intel product, you get dual channel support. If you have workstation stuff (I think SNB-E and higher) you can get quad channel. The memory itself has no impact on that. It's all advertising.Reply

agreed. if AMD is able to launch APU's with GDDR5 support and a memory kit to go with it, it would be a great strike. even if it has the limitation of HAVING to populate all 4 memory slots in this case.Reply

The Richland SKU of Trinity has some models with 2133 support. I.e. overclocked memory that is easy to handle with a kit with an XMP profile, when firmware is there to handle it which it largely won't unless you manually do it.Reply